e-R&D – Effectively Managing Process Diversity

Abstract

Managing process diversity becomes increasingly relevant in software development. Software organizations typically do not work on the greenfield and thus need to integrate external workflows with R&D internal workflow management and heterogeneous development and maintenance processes. To stay competitive with its software development, Alcatel has put in place an orchestrated improvement program of its processes and the underlying engineering tools environment. Why do we call this “e-R&D”? For two reasons. These improvement activities necessarily fit into the wider context of Alcatel's business process improvement and corporate e-business initiatives. The “e-R&D” also means enabling of interactive R&D processes and increasing collaborative work across the globe. At Alcatel we realized, during a substantial reengineering of our development and industrialization processes, that the approach to acquire an off-the-shelf process and tailor it to our needs was not applicable. Different processes need to be seamlessly integrated to avoid inconsistencies and inefficiency caused by replicated work. Specific focus is given within this article on how we manage process diversity in a product line where various components are embedded in individual architectures, asking for different but defined development and maintenance processes depending on pre-selected criteria.